Good evening everyone.
Welcome to our daily Dhamma broadcast.
Testing out our new broadcast method.
And to our local meditators who again have spent a day
dedicating themselves to Buddhist teaching.
When we study the Buddha's teaching, it's easy to get lost in the Buddha's teaching.
It's not easy to sum up the Buddha's teaching in a few words.
It seems like everywhere you pull at the Buddha's teaching it leads to something else.
So to really understand it takes often quite a bit of
quite a bit of explanation a bit of picking here and there but we do have various basic starting points we have the Buddha's starting point where he started when he began to teach when the Buddha began to teach first he wasn't going to teach
He became enlightened.
He had no inclination to teach.
It's sort of the dilemma of becoming enlightened.
On the one hand, you have great benefit and you're a wonderful person to learn from.
On the other hand, you have no desire left, so
no intention to teach unless invited.
Fortunately for us, the Buddha was invited to teach.
And so he taught.
He turned the wheel of Dhamma.
He set in motion a living tradition, a lineage to be handed
from teacher to student.
That has continued rolling up until the present day.
It all started with five ascetics reluctant to hear the Buddha's teaching because it went against their views and their idea of having to torture oneself in order to become enlightened.
And so the Buddha explained to them the middle way The first thing he taught was that Spiritual practice need not be extreme, shouldn't be extreme Religious practice shouldn't be a reaction Shouldn't be a reaction to the problem of
Worldliness shouldn't be a reaction to the problem of desire and ambition and clinging and so on.
A religious practice should be an understanding.
Something very special about the Buddha's teaching as a religion is how important it is for one to cultivate understanding.
Buddhism isn't, of course, about faith.
It isn't about escaping the mundane.
It's about understanding, understanding the mundane.
Buddhism is at once a religion and a science.
It's a religion because we take it seriously.
It's not just about knowledge and wisdom.
It's about us.
It's about our lives.
It's about the very core of our being, our identity, who we are.
It's about our future.
It's about ourselves.
It's about happiness and peace.
It's a science because it involves investigation, observations and conclusions based on solid observations.
So the Buddha taught this as a middle way, a middle way of understanding really, right view, right thought, right speech, right action.
right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.
You see, so it becomes a whole bunch of things.
You start with something simple, but it's not really simple at all.
Right view is the knowledge of the Four Noble Truths.
So it's reflective and it's recursive.
It's an infinite loop.
Yeah.
You talk about the Eightfold Noble Path and you end up going to the Four Noble Truths, the fourth of which is the Eightfold Noble Path, the first of which involves the Four Noble Truths, and so on.
You see, Buddhism is just explaining the Buddha's teaching.
It requires us to be content and to touch upon pieces of it.
To really explain all of the Buddha's teaching gets more complicated.
So when we talk about the Eightfold Noble Path, we have eight parts we can actually, if we just want to get a sense of it.
It's very useful to go into detail, but if we just want to get a sense of it, we talk about the three trainings.
Right view involves the Four Noble Truths, understanding the Four Noble Truths, and it involves having right thoughts, thoughts that are free from greed, anger, delusion.
But altogether it just means wisdom.
This is what we mean by wisdom.
Right view and right thought.
And then we have right speech, right action, right livelihood, so
We don't kill, we don't steal, we don't lie and cheat.
But altogether, it just means ethics, morality, sila, to have a proper ethic.
It means our actions and our speech should be mindful.
Ultimately, morality is a part of a meditation practice.
Ethics isn't putting yourself in a situation where you might kill and not kill.
Do you think, living in a meditation center, how can you cultivate morality?
It's a part of your meditation practice.
When you walk,
You can walk unethically.
And when you speak, when you eat, when you shower, your shower is ethically charged.
But you didn't realize that when you're on the toilet, it can be an unethical act.
The ethics of the bathroom.
It's very true.
No joke.
The things that you do, is your mind pure?
Is your mind clear?
Are you clearly aware of what you're doing?
That's proper morality.
It's associated with mindfulness.
The mind that has mindfulness also has morality.
It also is ethical.
You can never kill or steal or lie or cheat mindfully.
There has to be a moment where you disregard the clarity of mind that comes with mindfulness and you force yourself, push yourself to do something unethical.
Ethics becomes much stronger in a meditation center.
Of course, you're not killing or stealing or lying or cheating.
Great.
That's wonderful.
Being in a meditation center, ethics is quite easy.
But it becomes much more refined and powerful because you're eating ethically.
You're not greedy when you eat.
You're not eating out of greed.
Your actions are pure.
When you're in the shower, you're showering ethically, mindfully.
There's no delusion.
There's no greed.
There's no anger.
And the last three are right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.
Altogether, it's the samadhi, which we translate as concentration or focus.
So it's the concentration section.
To have proper concentration, you need effort.
It takes work.
You need mindfulness.
So right concentration isn't just about focusing the mind.
It's about being clearly aware as well.
Being focused on the object and having the object in focus.
It's easy to be focused on something.
Well, it's not really.
It's easy to feel focused in the sense of the mind that is stiff and unbending, but it's much harder to be in focus where you're actually aware of the object and clearly grasping it in your awareness.
So sila-samadhi-panya, we can do this sort of thing.
We abbreviate the Buddhist teaching to get a sense of it.
It helps us so we don't have to get, because each one of the eightfold noble parts can be further subdivided.
We can talk about each one of them and it sends us down the rabbit hole.
But that's the first thing the Buddha taught and then he put it in the larger context.
That was in many ways the first teaching, the first thing he taught was much more directed to the specific audience because they were at an extreme.
They were torturing themselves and they were really reluctant to listen to him because obviously he was no longer practicing in an extreme way.
So if you want to say the first teaching proper, it was what came next, and that's the actual delineation of the Four Noble Truths.
So in remembering the Buddha, remembrance of the Buddha's teaching, and getting back to our own basics, starting at the beginning, we go over the Four Noble Truths.
remind ourselves, what are these?
What is this that we're seeking?
The Buddha said about these, Not seeing these formidable truths, I wandered on from life to life.
Wandered along.
for such a long time from life, from birth to birth.
So the first noble truth is the one we're all familiar with, suffering.
We're familiar with it in two ways.
We're familiar with it as the first, or as the essence of the Buddha's teaching.
Yes, what is Buddhism all about?
Yes, it's all about suffering.
And also second, we're familiar with it because we're familiar with suffering.
I think it's hard to find someone who doesn't have at least a mild sense of what it means to suffer.
You might criticize certain people and say they live such pampered lives, they don't know suffering, but I don't think it really matters how pampered you are.
You still suffer as a human being.
A rich person suffers
When they have to wait for, when they don't get what they want immediately, they still suffer.
Even when they get what they want, they still might suffer when it's not exactly what they expected.
In fact, you might say the more spoiled a person is, the more suffering they have.
constantly wanting.
And whenever you're wanting, there's a stress involved.
There's a suffering involved.
You're not, you're not happy.
You're anxious.
You're displeased.
You're uncomfortable.
Most people don't understand happiness.
They think they do.
They think they know what happiness is.
So it's such a surprise once they begin to meditate to realize how much they're suffering.
In the beginning, it often feels like the meditation is causing you suffering.
This meditation, wow.
It's really unpleasant to meditate, right?
But all it's doing is showing you you.
It's saying, hey, stop running away from it and let's see what we've got inside.
Because believe it or not, some people practice meditation and don't suffer terribly.
And so you come to realize that it's really our own minds that cause us suffering.
It's nothing to do with the meditation.
Meditation is just showing you this first noble truth.
They're noble because they're important, because they're useful, because these are the truths that make you free.
These are the truths that set you free.
There are many kinds of truth that don't.
And if you know and understand them, they're not really that useful.
But understanding these truths, they're very fundamental to not an impersonal understanding of the universe, but they're very fundamental to an understanding of our universe, of us, of who we are.
They're very religious in that sense.
They're truths that are important, that are useful, that are all about us, all about our experience.
So suffering, it's there.
And really it's the one you have to understand.
If you understand suffering and you see what is causing you suffering and you really get it, it's all you need.
So this is an important point about Buddhism, is that suffering is not to be escaped.
It's not something we run from, something we come to understand.
The goal in Buddhism is not to escape suffering, not directly, exactly.
The goal of Buddhism is to understand suffering.
And then, and only then, can you escape it.
Because we cause ourselves suffering.
Why?
Because of the second noble truth.
What is the cause of suffering?
The cause of suffering really, it's not exactly what the Buddha said because you have to again go deeper.
The real cause of suffering is not understanding suffering.
Seeing things that are
unsatisfying or unable to satisfy, even thinking they're going to satisfy.
Because it's that which leads to the direct cause of suffering, which is desire or thirst or craving.
This ambition or this attraction to various experiences and concepts and objects.
And so through understanding, through understanding suffering, through the first noble truth, when you really understand it, what happens is you abandon craving.
It's quite simple.
We're often concerned with giving up our addictions, giving up our desires and being more content living a simpler life.
And so we strive to free ourselves and to free ourselves from addiction.
Really, we go about it all wrong.
We don't have to worry about the addiction.
Look at the thing you're addicted to, and we're afraid to, because we think that's attractive, that's desirable.
So in order to be free from it, you have to avoid it.
You have to not think about that thing, because that thing makes you happy.
We know that ultimately it makes us unhappy, but we also know that we really...
really are pleased by it, that somehow deep down in our heart of hearts we're attracted to it.
Which we can't figure out because intellectually we know it's horrible for us, you know.
Alcohol is awful, but I like it.
And so the wonderful thing about Buddhism, this great claim that it makes,
It's that it's not attractive.
It's that if you, the only reason we're attracted to things, anything, is because we don't understand it.
Because we haven't seen it clearly.
That if you observe something, anything, for what it is, as it is, clearly, there's no way, it's impossible for you to be attracted to it.
Isn't that a powerful claim?
It's not possible to like something if you understand it.
It's not possible to be attached to something.
That's the second noble truth.
The third noble truth is the cessation of suffering.
This speaks to the real goal, right?
The final goal, which is to escape.
Just don't.
Don't like to talk about it exactly like that because it's easy to get the wrong idea that that should be our focus.
Let's run away.
Let's go to Canada and stay in a room in a basement and I won't have to deal with all the suffering of life.
I'll be able to find the door.
Get me out of here.
There's no secret door in our basement, not that I've found.
There's no way out of suffering like that.
The cessation of suffering, of course, comes when you stop craving things, which comes from when you understand them.
But nonetheless, it is real and it's important to talk about.
Cessation from suffering is real.
Cessation of suffering is real.
Freedom from suffering.
Nibbana is real.
And when you realize it, boy, is it real.
It's the most real thing, the most
It's in a whole other category of existence.
It's ineffable.
It's indescribable.
It's not all that hard to understand intellectually.
It's just freedom, peace, cessation.
But it doesn't come anywhere close to doing it justice.
We have one goal and one goal only.
There is no complicated goal in Buddhism.
There is no esoteric or biased.
There's nothing specifically Buddhist as a goal.
The goal is very simple.
It's the one goal that is of any use, of any value to any of us.
It's freedom from suffering.
The fourth noble truth again is the path, which I've already talked about.
And that was it.
That was the first teaching of the Buddha, really.
He goes on to say, there's one more thing, is that he talks about how each of these truths is important to understand, but there's something you have to do.
There's a task to be done.
So as I mentioned, the first noble truth, the suffering is to be understood, fully understood.
Second noble truth, the cause of suffering is to be abandoned.
abandoned through understanding.
Third noble truth, the cessation of suffering is to be realized for yourself.
Fourth noble truth, the path is to be cultivated.
And once suffering has been understood, fully understood, once craving, desire has been fully abandoned, once the cessation of suffering has been realized,
And once the path has been followed in order to realize it, that's when one can say one is enlightened.
Not before that.
That's the Buddha's first teaching.
That's the basics of Buddhism.
That's really where Buddhism starts.
If you want someone to understand Buddhism, this sort of thing is really...
I don't know how... What's the word?
I don't know how easy to understand this is for someone who is new to Buddhism, but there's nothing simple about Buddhism in the sense of easy for ordinary people to understand.
If you haven't done some meditation, if you haven't begun to see reality, if you don't have a clear mind, it can be very difficult to understand Buddhism.
Of course, once you practice, it's all quite very simple.
For those of you who have been meditating, I don't think anything I've said tonight is abstruse or hard to understand or esoteric in any way.
So there you go.
There's our Dhamma for tonight.
I hope that was useful.
I hope the broadcast went okay.
It looks like it's going fine.
I figured everything out after last night.
And I can't still get, I can't now get the audio working.
Our audio broadcast somehow is broken.
It won't let me, I don't know what happened there.
So
If there are any questions, I'm happy to answer them.
What advice can you give for meditation discipline to practice much more?
I suppose I could.
I get this question a lot, but my inclination is to say,
Motivation is your job.
It's not my job to motivate you.
Yeah, that's not fair, is it?
Teachers are supposed to motivate.
But what I want to say is that I'm not going to hold your hand and a teacher shouldn't hold your hand.
What a teacher should do is give you this kick in the pants.
I think it's quite motivating to tell you that you have to motivate yourself.
I think that's the best advice I can give you for motivation is stop asking me to motivate you.
Because it's lazy, right?
I'm sorry, I don't mean to be critical, but I get this question a lot.
And I think this is how I'm inclined to answer it.
Why?
Because it's more, see, it's more deep than that.
The point being,
it's not going to work out.
There's no God.
I mean, we come in the Western world very much entrenched in this idea, not even this idea, but this sense that there's a purpose to the universe and that God has a plan for you.
I mean, even if we're not Christian or Jewish,
We grew up in this sort of idea, this environment, and it's not true.
Everything might go to garbage for you.
You might wind up in hell and who knows where you're going in the future.
It's not all going to work out.
There is no happy ending.
Unless you make it.
It's completely up to you.
So that's really the one thing that a person has to do for themselves is motivate themselves.
Think of that as your one job is to get motivated.
to do it, to actually do it.
And if you think like that, if you're focused on that, I think everything else comes, right?
Chanda is the first step when you want to do something, when you're interested in doing something, when you have the inclination to do something.
Okay, do we have lots of questions here?
Okay.
I guess I should go over to Second Life as well and see what's going on there.
How are we doing over here at Second Life?
Right.
So there's sort of a question.
We shouldn't run away from suffering, but the purpose of Buddhism is to escape suffering.
Yes.
The purpose in Buddhism is to be free from suffering.
It's much simpler than you're making out to be, I think.
It's not really a contradiction.
There's something wrong with us.
And that's clear.
Or maybe not clear.
Buddhism makes the claim that suffering is because of us.
There's something wrong with us, and that's why we suffer.
That's sort of a Buddhist claim.
It's not because someone else is hurting us.
It's not because of our situation.
It's not because we're missing something.
It's us.
Something's wrong with us.
So what we do is we try to figure that out.
We try to understand that, to really figure out what's wrong with us.
And the idea is once you understand it, you solve the problem.
That's really all it is.
So when we talk about being free from suffering, being free from the problem, well, if you want to be free from a problem, you really should try and figure out what the problem is, figure out what you're doing wrong, and then start doing it right.
That's all.
I really need an assistant here to sort out all these questions.
Maybe we shouldn't do the live chat questions.
There's just too many of them.
Make it more difficult.
We should just do questions on our site.
That's what we should do.
Too many questions.
And they're questions I ask again and again.
I answer again and again.
Okay, so I'm going to be selective tonight.
Is laying down okay to meditate?
Yes, absolutely.
Can one live an enlightened life in this society?
Yes, qualified yes.
If you become really enlightened, you start to leave society and get less interested in it.
If you're completely enlightened, you really can't engage in society in the way other people do.
Yeah, you can certainly lie down.
That's no problem.
Pros and cons of being a monk in the West versus East?
I don't know.
That's not something I think about.
Those aren't the sorts of questions I answer.
Sorry.
See, I'm not a very good teacher.
I'm very crabby and I'm very picky.
I don't answer all your questions.
How does meditation involve itself with that?
Being able to control, I don't get it Ask me a simpler question And Sanka with his good questions Okay, let's delve into Sanka's question Why are the salayatana omitted from the Mahadit Nidhana Sutta?
What do I look like, the Buddha?
I can answer this And I can answer why he taught what he did
Let's see, Maha Nidhana, so we're looking at the, yeah, this is Paticca Samuppada.
Hmm.
That's a good question.
Well, the six senses are in contact.
Contact is the six senses.
That's what I would say quite simply.
I'm as surprised as you are that they're missing.
It's a good point.
Good question.
It's a very terrible translation as usual.
Tanisarabhika is a really good monk, but he's not a very good translator.
I'm sorry to say.
I'm not the only one who thinks that.
Let's see if I can find this.
Which one is it?
It's 15, right?
Okay.
D and 15.
Let's get Maurice Walsh's version, see if it's any better.
The six sense bases are omitted for some reason in this sutta.
That's what Maurice Walsh says.
That's what the commentary says.
The six sense bases are contact, or contact is the six sense bases.
I mean, the brief scan of the commentary doesn't really say why he omitted them, it just says that they're in there.
yeah i mean i have to spend a little time translating that but it's basically that they're together
Because contact means contact of the sense, contact at the moment of seeing, at the moment of hearing.
Someone might say, I'm not going to be the one to say it, but I'll say someone might say that it was just a copyist error, that it actually should be in there, but in fact was an error of copying or transcribing or passing on the text.
And we have to accept that that is a possibility.
Even if as Buddhists we don't like that idea.
Good very well have to do with the audience.
That's a good point.
Okay.
There's too many questions.
I can't get through them all.
Okay, someone here is trying to ask me a question.
Dick Carlisle asked, but it's not really a question, so you have to give me something simpler.
What do you mean?
Do you believe in God?
No.
Did Buddha believe in God?
No.
Buddhism with Hindu, yogi, Christianity.
That's okay.
Power to you.
Do as you like.
I'm not here to tell you what to do.
What do you think about rhythmic breathing?
I don't.
I don't teach rhythmic breathing.
Does the Buddha believe in God?
No.
Do Westerners really understand meditation?
Yeah, I don't know.
Not my question.
Can a tourist go with kasaya robe in Thailand?
Are you asking whether a non-monk can wear the robe?
If they do, no, they'll get in big trouble for that.
They get arrested for that.
I mean, you can.
You just might get arrested if they find out.
What do you think of Alcoholics Anonymous?
I, in fact, do sometimes think about Alcoholics Anonymous.
I'm not convinced.
I mean, I think it's impressive and I appreciate the good results that people get from it and how thoughtful it is and so on.
But I think you can see how it's not exactly Buddhist.
It might be effective to help people free themselves from alcohol.
And we'd want to say that some of the best parts of it are in line with Buddhism.
But I think the whole reliance on a higher power is sketchy at best.
What is the significance of the robe?
Well, the robe, it's the lack of significance, really.
I mean, the significance is the simplicity of it.
The robe that we wear is just a rectangle, the idea being we shouldn't wear anything more fancy than that.
So I wear two rectangles of cloth.
There's no sleeves.
There's no buttons.
And it's sewn and made up of pieces so that it's less valuable.
It's not one big beautiful piece of cloth.
It's pieces that have been stitched together.
Yeah, there's lots of questions.
This is quite surprising, actually.
I didn't realize opening up live chat would
subject me to question after question after question.
Why do many monks...
I'm not going to answer that.
Okay, why do many monks think it's okay to use tobacco?
I think many monks don't think it's okay to use tobacco, but they're addicted to it.
And it's sort of become a culture in Asia.
I guess there is sort of a tradition where...
Buddhism was not very strong, I think, is the answer, and it just became a tradition for monks to smoke.
But it's hard as a Western to understand it, and I think most of them realize it's not good, but they're addicted.
I mean, they're not really meditating is the point.
I mean, I think we have this illusion about monks is that they all meditate all the time, and it's not really true.
Well, it's significant in that wearing a robe means you're a monk.
So if you pretend to be a monk for Thai people, that's significant.
What is your view on solipsism?
I had this funny experience in New York.
I said, as Buddhists, I don't think Buddhism is against solipsism.
I don't think we can know whether we're in a solipsistic universe.
I don't think it matters.
But theoretically,
And this monk I was sitting beside was horrified, a Western monk.
I was quite surprised at how vehemently against solipsism he was.
To me, solipsism is just a mind game.
It doesn't really mean anything.
Whether I am the only real being and you are all just emanations of my reality doesn't really matter to a Buddhist because the experience of it is what it is.
And it's only the experience that we're interested in.
So it's just something, some mind candy for us to ponder on and get caught up in and lost in.
Did the Buddha have dreams?
Yes, the Buddha had dreams.
He had some very special dreams.
Now they're just getting silly.
Okay, too many questions.
Too many questions.
Ask them.
I'm not going to answer.
I've had enough.
If you really want to ask a question, we'll prioritize those questions on our website.
So you can go to meditation.sirimangalo.org.
Let me see.
I'll post a link.
Sign up for our site.
Join our meditation community.
There's our site.
Did the Buddha have dreams after his enlightenment?
Maybe not.
I'm not quite sure about that.
It's a good question.
He may not have.
I think my teacher once said that Arahants don't dream.
I think it is a specific...
I mean, it would be kind of silly if they did, right?
Would that be a sense of distraction and a mind that is not completely at peace?
Okay.
Well, thank you all for tuning in.
Do we have any more here?
No.
Okay.
Well, thank you all for coming out.
Have a good night.
See you all next time.